MIL in the Media

As the trolling ramped up in 2015, President Sauli Niinisto called on every Finn to take responsibility for the fight against false information. A year later, Finland brought in American experts to advise officials. The education system was also reformed to emphasize critical thinking. “The first line of defense is the kindergarten teacher'.

Among the changes:
Facebook is now reducing the reach of groups that repeatedly spread misinformation.
It is exploring the use of crowdsourcing as a way to determine which news outlets users trust most.
And the company is adding new indicators to Messenger, groups and News Feed in an effort to inform users about the content they’re seeing.

A barrage of fake images in Kashmir. Jency Jacob had never seen anything like it. “We have been fact-checking since November 2016,” the Boom Live managing editor tweeted on Monday. “Never before has one incident taught us so many things about new forms of #fakeimages.”

The research examined two main questions:
1. Do uncivil comments on news stories make people perceive other site users and the news site more negatively?
2. Do people make this evaluation about the news site based on the first few comments they see or based on the predominant tone of all the visible comments in the stream?

SOURCE: The University of Texas at Austin - Center for Media Engagement

Heated debates focus on new and emerging technologies in the lives of children, young people, families and schools. New research brings together the perspectives of tech industry insiders and those of young people, parents, and educators across Europe, to explore the future of tech and provide practical recommendations.

SOURCE: London School of Economics - Parenting for a Digital Future blog

According to Serbian fact-checking portal Raskrikavanje, more than 700 false or unverified news stories were published on the front pages of three Serbian tabloids (Informer, Alo and Srpski Telegraf) in 2018.
These false or unfounded news articles were mainly pushing narratives on President Putin’s strong support to Serbia and the war rhetoric and inflammatory reporting on Kosovo.

Through 20 interviews with stakeholders in online advertising, this study looks at how the programmatic advertising industry understands “fake news,” how it conceptualizes and grapples with the use of its tools by hoax publishers to generate revenue, and how its approach to the issue may ultimately contribute to reshaping the financial underpinnings of the digital journalism industry that depends on the same economic infrastructure.

Parenting for a Digital Future releases the fourth in its series of reports from its nationally representative survey of UK parents of children aged 0-17. This report highlights why digital inequalities matter in our increasingly digitalized and connected world. In this post, Sonia Livingstone and Dongmiao Zhang discuss the major findings from the study, and outline why socio-economic status and parental education are extremely important in shaping children’s digital lives and why.

SOURCE: London School of Economics - Parenting for a Digital Future Blog

The internet has always been awash with misinformation and hate, but never has it felt so inescapable and overwhelming as it did this year. From Facebook’s role in fanning the flames of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar to the rise of QAnon to the so-called migrant caravan to the influence campaign conducted by the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency, 2018 was a rough year to be online, regardless of the strength of your media literacy skills.

11 studies we have found valuable for insights on how children conceptualise privacy, their (often frustrated and resigned) interactions with digital environments, their understandings of data, and the role of parents in children’s privacy online.

As governments, institutions, civil society and industry seek to tackle the challenges posed by misinformation, improving the public’s media literacy and/or digital literacy is often cited as a potential solution.
Gianfranco Polizzi, a PhD researcher at the LSE, discusses how critical digital literacy relates to trust, and how policy conversations should be redirected.

A large-scale study by the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that young people at every stage from middle school to college were consistently unable to differentiate news from advertising, or false information from the truth, a state of affairs the researchers described as “bleak.”

Teachers are looking for ways to integrate media literacy into their classroom – especially since it became obvious that students cannot distinguish between real or fake news. Here are six ways to help you teach your students to be media literate.

Misinformation and distrust are the characteristic of our time. They make the question of how to approach and promote critical digital literacy particularly important. Gianfranco Polizzi suggests ten texts that offer a framework for thinking about how to do it.

There are different ways that fake news sites fake us out. In GIJN’s latest tutorial, Olga Yurkova, co-founder of Ukrainian fact-checking project StopFake, runs through six main techniques used and offers some simple tools to verify what is true — and what isn’t.